Obamawear: Post-election T-shirts are hot item

Campaign's over, but it's still hip to wear his face on your chest, and T-shirts are selling like crazy

Regan McMahon, Special to The Chronicle

Published
4:00 am PST, Sunday, November 30, 2008

One of the most popular post-election Obama t-shirts, sold online at Cafe Press.

One of the most popular post-election Obama t-shirts, sold online at Cafe Press.

Photo: Cafe Press

Photo: Cafe Press

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One of the most popular post-election Obama t-shirts, sold online at Cafe Press.

One of the most popular post-election Obama t-shirts, sold online at Cafe Press.

Photo: Cafe Press

Obamawear: Post-election T-shirts are hot item

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You don't have to turn on the news to see President-elect Barack Obama's face. Walk down the street and you'll see it coming at you on T-shirts that remain a hot item weeks after the election. Obama is not just a politician. He's a fashion icon.

Online retailer CafePress.com figured that its booming business in Obama paraphernalia would taper off the week after the election. Obamabelia represented 50 percent of all its candidate-related sales worldwide over the past year. (The next closest was McCain, at 19 percent.) Surely the gravy train would be pulling out of the station.

But it didn't. The San Mateo user-generated commerce site's spokesman, Marc Cowlin, said its Obama products are still selling briskly, with new post-election messages attracting buyers. The three most popular T-shirts at the moment proclaim "Hope Won," "That One Won" and "Yes We Did."

"Not too long ago," said Cowlin, "if you wanted to wear a T-shirt of a candidate, you were pretty much limited to getting it at campaign headquarters. Now, with the Internet, this is the first time they've been available on such a large scale."

Urban Outfitters has been selling T-shirts with Obama's face for months, since well before the primaries. Asked if sales are down now, Caitlin Reno at the Bancroft Street store in Berkeley said, "Oh, no. We're selling even more now. People are constantly coming in asking for them."

Reno said the store's biggest seller is still the original design by Shepard Fairey, the 38-year-old Los Angeles street artist and head of Obey, a poster, sticker and clothing empire with the motto "Manufacturing quality dissent since 1989." It features an Andy Warhol-esque portrait of Obama in red, white and blue with either "Progress" or "Hope" below it.

Crystal Carroll, a corporate spokeswoman at Urban Outfitters' national headquarters in Philadelphia, declined to discuss sales figures for the Obama shirts or why the retailer made the bold move of stocking a candidate T-shirt in the first place.

Street vendors have also found that customers keep buying. Emeryville designer Richard Lalaind, who sells his Rich Originals shirts at a booth in Oakland's Jack London Square every weekend, said people are still buying his Obama T-shirt. It's a black stenciled knockoff of the Fairey design, screen-printed with his "Serious" logo substituted for Obama's campaign button. "I've been using that logo since 1983," said Lalaind, "but he seems like a serious guy, so it works."

Many mainstream magazines have marketed T-shirts featuring reproductions of their Obama covers, including Time, Ebony and Rolling Stone. Some magazines and newspapers have made a killing selling commemorative special issues as well. The news outlets accurately tapped into people's urge to own a piece of history.

The compulsion among people of all ages, genders and races to wear a politician's image, especially after the election is over, is unprecedented. We've seen this kind of visual idealization of leaders in China, Cuba and the U.S.S.R., but never in the United States, other than framed official photos in the classroom and, in FDR's day, in some homes. Here, it's been cool to have some outsider or revolutionary on your chest, such as Che Guevara or Martin Luther King Jr. or Bob Marley, but never the man in power.

"All those people are dead," noted James L. Taylor, associate professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and president-elect of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. "Obama is alive, and that adds to the phenomenal nature of popular support for him. It is like Evita Peron in Argentina. ... I think that this is less about Obama the man and more about the vindication of America - the people, who had the courage to carry out an 'electoral revolution,' given the nation's history in race."

As for why Obama shirts are not at the back of the drawer yet: "Some of this is feeling good about being on the winning side, but it also probably reflects a desire to stay mobilized," said Charles Henry, chair of the African American studies department at UC Berkeley.

"African Americans have long worn the faces of black leaders, so I think it makes absolute sense to see them wearing Obama shirts," said Leigh Raiford, UC Berkeley assistant professor of African American studies. "In the '90s, a lot of people wore shirts that said 'Martin, Malcolm, Mandela and Me.' But then they veered away from political figures and consciousness due to political disillusionment and disinterest among a certain generation." She said the students in her class on election day looked like a fashion show of various Obama shirts, and some were also wearing American flags.

Raiford said that the popularity of the shirts speaks to Obama's charisma and a desire people have to be close to him, and that there's a hipness in wearing a black person on your shirt that feeds into the cultural fascination with black images.

"But our political involvement can't end with our fashion choices," she cautioned. "That's always the danger. That's what happened with Che Guevara - when iconoclast becomes the icon."

"I've been creating images for 20 years, but nothing has come close to this," Fairey told CBS News, referring to the image that appears on the Urban Outfitters shirts. "I think it's due to the emotion behind Obama. Young people and artists especially respond to authenticity. And whether he's just very good at seeming authentic or he's really authentic, I think he has a lot of us convinced."

Fairey's Obama portrait is featured in the exhibition "Regime Change Starts at Home" at Irvine Contemporary, a gallery in Washington, D.C., through Dec. 6. And the art blog Supertouchart.com reports that the Smithsonian Institution is interested in purchasing for the National Portrait Gallery a Fairey piece incorporating the portrait. The work was the centerpiece of the "Manifest Hope" art show in Denver during the Democratic National Convention.

Sales of T-shirts and memorabilia are expected to ramp up as we approach inauguration day Jan. 20. "There's so much electricity about Obama," Cowlin said. "This is the first time a politician has become a fashion statement and truly captured the attention of a nation."